New Harvard Policy Bans Teacher-Student Relations

Harvard University has adopted a ban on professors’ having sexual or romantic relationships with undergraduate students, joining a small but growing number of universities prohibiting such relationships. The move comes as the Obama administration investigates the handling of accusations of sexual assault at dozens of colleges, including Harvard.

The ban clarifies an earlier policy that labeled sexual and romantic relationships between professors and the students they teach as inappropriate, but did not explicitly prohibit professors from having relationships with students they did not teach.

Harvard said Thursday that the change had been made after a panel reviewing the institution’s policy on Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, determined that the university’s existing policy language on “relationships of unequal status did not explicitly reflect the faculty’s expectations of what constituted an appropriate relationship between undergraduate students and faculty members.” It said the policy had been revised “to include a clear prohibition to better accord with these expectations.”

The change was recommended by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Committee on Sexual Misconduct Policy and Procedures. It was made public Monday in a document revising the division’s sexual harassment policy.

Besides banning sexual and romantic relationships between professors and all undergraduates, the policy also bans such relationships between teaching staff, such as graduate students, and the students who fall under their supervision or evaluation.

“Our rule is that if you are supervising, evaluating or grading someone, you should not have a sexual relationship with that person,” said Alison Johnson, a history professor who led the committee.

The American Association of University Professors does not recommend that colleges ban such relationships, but the organization has noted that they “are fraught with the potential for exploitation.”

It says that intimate relationships between students and professors make consent hard to determine because of the unequal power dynamic, and leave institutions vulnerable to allegations of sexual harassment.

After the courts found in the 1990s that universities could be financially liable for sexual harassment, many institutions — among them, the University of California and Yale — adopted formal policies forbidding sexual or romantic relationships between faculty and students.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: New Harvard Policy Bans Teacher-Student Relations. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe